The Bloke: Signing up to Twitter

I’d been resisting it for quite some time, mostly because the Missus had made me highly suspicious that it was some 1984-ish instrument for social control.

In truth she’s never been a big fan of technology of any kind. Next to her Amish people look positively hi-tech.

She won’t sign up to Facebook because she’s convinced it’s run by the CIA (which to be fair, it probably is) and she generally makes chubby conspiracy theorist Michael Moore look naively trusting of national governments and large corporations.

My other reservation though was down to the fact that most people’s Tweets are about as interesting as listening to an Ed Miliband speech.

I agree with the comedian (I forget which one) who said Twitter has replaced the thoughts that were once relayed via a complex network of synapses to the brain.

Now they just go on Twitter, as anyone who’s read an inane ‘Just about to boil the kettle’ Tweet can confirm.

Promising to be better than that, I officially launched my Twitter page last Tuesday night. Then promptly realised that wasn’t a great time to launch it as my column wouldn’t be in the paper for another week, meaning no one would even know it existed.

But then on Thursday a miracle happened – I got my first follower. Something called The Wick (Teen Drama) signed up to receive my feed.

Never having heard of The Wick (Teen Drama), but grateful that I finally had someone to foist my trivial witterings upon, I decided to do some research.

It turns out The Wick is an online teen drama series set at a boarding school in the north of England. It stars someone called Stephen Beard who apparently used to be in non-online teen drama Hollyoaks.

This nugget of information got me worried.

Could it be that The Wick (Teen Drama) was only following me because I’d mentioned Hollyoaks in one of the three Tweets I had made up to the point that it started following me?

“Just watched Bedlam on Sky,” I’d written on Wednesday night. “Like Hollyoaks meets Rentaghost only the acting’s not as good.”

Did The Wick (Teen Drama) think this meant I actually liked Hollyoaks? Had I lured it in under false pretences?

I wrestled with the idea of clarifying my stance in a subsequent Tweet. Then decided not to on the basis that with just one follower I could hardly afford to risk losing them, because then I would quite simply be Tweeting messages to myself and how sad would that be?

Although I did think it best to clear up a later update in which I related to my one follower that I had stumbled across a reunion of Deal Or No Deal contestants in the Lounge.

My next Tweet explained that I meant the Lounge bar in Leeds city centre and not my actual living room, because then The Wick (Teen Drama) might have thought I was a complete fantasist, carefully re-read my Tweet mentioning Hollyoaks and stopped following me altogether.

What I’m basically trying to say is that I really need you to start following me on Twitter in case my fragile friendship with The Wick (Teen Drama), already hanging by a thread, finally goes pear-shaped.

* Sign up at: www.twitter.com/theblokeyep and I promise to try and be mildly entertainly and, more importantly, not tell you when I’m about to put the kettle on.